Regardless of what else is going on, the Kennedys hold fast to holiday tradition. On Easter Sunday, the clan attends Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church. But rumors that something shocking has happened at the Kennedy estate are already spreading, although some locals take a rather blasé attitude.
“Over the years I’ve been to many parties at the Kennedy house,” socialite Susan Polan tells People magazine. “One plays tennis there, one goes to parties there, but there are times when you don’t go up to the Kennedy house unless you expect to be raucous. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re just boys, and boys will be boys.”
Nevertheless, by late afternoon on Monday, April 1, 1991, Palm Beach detectives are knocking at the door of the mansion, though most of the family has already left town.
Sadly, it’s not the first time Palm Beach detectives have needed to talk to the Kennedy family at Easter.
Seven years earlier, over Easter week 1984, Ethel and Bobby Kennedy’s twenty-eight-year-old son David Anthony Kennedy was found dead of a fatal overdose in Room 107 of the Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach.
The family is devastated, but not shocked—for years they’ve all been asking each other what to do about David and his escalating addictions.
David—the fourth of Bobby and Ethel’s eleven children, after Kathleen, Joe, and Bobby Jr.—has always been a sensitive, small boy. Family friend Chuck McDermott remembers, “There was some level on which David tapped his father’s sensitivity. You would find him walking with David or with his arm around David. David just seemed to need it.”
In April 1968, Bobby consults the child psychologist Robert Coles when twelve-year-old David has a run-in with police, who catch the boy throwing rocks at motorists passing near Hickory Hill. Coles recalls Bobby’s eyes widening when he makes the connection that David “was a little like him, throwing rocks at strangers—or LBJ,” as Bobby had been metaphorically doing since Jack’s death in 1963.
A few months later, on June 4, David nearly drowns while swimming in the Pacific, but his father is able to jump in to save him. Later that same night, while up watching Bobby’s victory in the California primary, David is horrified to witness his father’s assassination live on TV.
His near-death experience “made Bob even larger than life to David,” remarks Kennedy family friend John Seigenthaler. “And then 12 hours later, he lost this father in a most horrible way.” Ethel similarly notes to her personal assistant, Noelle Bombardier, that Bobby “saved David’s life the very same day he lost his own, and David really never could understand any of it,” theorizing, “It was as if he thought God had traded his life in for his dad’s.”
The boy’s trauma is largely swept under the rug, however. “No one ever talked to me about what I was feeling,” David states. When he tries to bring it up to his mother, Ethel snaps that “It’s not a subject I want to discuss.” What they do instead, apparently, is medicate his emotional pain away. “We took him to the doctor and the doctor put him on some medication. One thing led to another,” Ethel tells Bombardier. David moves on to recreational drugs, and by the time he’s fifteen, he and his cousin Christopher Lawford are hitchhiking to New York City and buying heroin in Central Park. “David and I sort of decided together that there really wasn’t any reason to be good any more, so we might as well be bad,” Chris recalls.
In August 1973, when David is eighteen, he’s injured in a jeep accident on Nantucket caused by his older brother Joe. Joe, David, and five teenage girls, including David’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Pamela Kelley, are all in the car at the time. Joe “was doing his SuperKennedy act,” as David puts it. “There was all this crazy energy. I suppose Teddy was that way before Chappaquiddick.”
“It was typical Kennedy horseplay,” Kelley agrees. “We were all laughing as Joe spun the Jeep ’round and ’round and ’round.” Of the passengers, she is the most seriously injured—permanently paralyzed in both legs. David’s injuries are less severe, but after receiving morphine at the hospital, he becomes ever more reliant on drugs.
By 1976, David has dropped out of Harvard and Boston College, and in 1978 suffers an overdose (though publicly his uncle Stephen Smith, the Kennedy family spin doctor, labels it “pneumonia”).
For the next several years, David’s in and out of various rehab clinics, making optimistic attempts to get better but always backsliding. So it comes as no surprise to the clan when Ethel’s son is arrested in 1983 after overdosing on heroin.
Except it’s not David.
It’s Bobby Jr.
“David was the Kennedy screw-up, not Bobby,” his cousin Christopher Lawford points out. “This was a real wake-up call.”
Fortunately for Bobby Jr., his stint in rehab is far more successful than David’s many attempts, which in some ways leaves David feeling worse than ever. “Kennedys don’t fail,” his uncle Ted tells him. Yet David has failed sobriety over and over.
He feels like he’s been letting his family down, failing to meet their high expectations. Once, when the question of what it means to be a Kennedy is posed to him, David replies, “It means that we’re exactly the same as everybody else, except better.” Yet the Kennedy he most relates to in his darker moments is Rosemary: “She was an embarrassment; I am an embarrassment. She was a hindrance; I am a hindrance.”
On March 19, 1984, he again attempts a stint in rehab, and a month later, heads to spend Easter with his extended family and ailing Grandma Rose in Palm Beach, Florida. Instead of staying at the “Kennedy Winter White House,” David checks in to the Brazilian Court Hotel, along with several other family members, as the house on North Ocean Boulevard couldn’t hold them all. Over the course of the next week, he rotates between dutiful visits to Rose and heavy drinking; various friends, family members, and hotel staff all later remark on David’s ability to consume staggering amounts of alcohol. (“I’ve heard it said that God invented alcohol to keep the Irish from ruling the world,” Chris Lawford later writes in the opening line of his 2005 memoir. “My family almost proved Him wrong.”)
Ethel isn’t down in Palm Beach for Easter that year, but she becomes increasingly concerned when she cannot reach her son after multiple calls to the hotel. She sends David’s cousins Caroline Kennedy and Sydney Lawford to check on him, but although the young women make two visits to the hotel, they are unable to locate him. On April 25, 1984, Ethel calls the hotel to request they open the door to David’s room. Ten minutes later, they call her back—but before they can inform her of what they’ve found, Ethel knows.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she says, gasping and hanging up on learning she is right. She’s later overheard lamenting to a friend, “When David died, my chance to be a better mother died with him.”
Press coverage of David Kennedy’s death in Palm Beach is extensive yet respectful. Seven years later, however, when his cousin Willie’s Easter scandal breaks, again in Palm Beach, the entire Kennedy family finds themselves drawn not only into the court of public opinion—but into an actual courtroom, where they witness one of their own stand trial.